Conflict of interest in the civil service: factors of effective regulation

Abstract

The effectiveness of conflicts of interest regulation in the civil service as one of the directions of anti-corruption policy is analyzed. Conflicts of interest management measures that underlie national anti-corruption laws are defined as two models – integrity-based and compliance-based. The first of them provides for increasing the professional standards for civil servants, while the second one is a model of strict prohibitions and legal sanctions. Despite the complexity of assessing the level of corruption and the quality of conflicts of interest regulation, this task is important and inevitable for the subsequent assessment of the effectiveness of public administration. Therefore, the factors that are associated with the effectiveness of conflicts of interest regulation in public service are determined. A regression analysis was conducted based on the data used for the formation of the international indices of corruption perception and the quality of institutions, as well as from the collected database of countries on models of conflicts of interest regulation. In the long term, these results can be used to elaborate practical recommendations for effective anti-corruption regulation.